Obamateurism of the Day

posted at 8:05 am on October 19, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

I know that Eleanor Clift included this anecdote in her Newsweek article as a slam at Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, but as I wrote yesterday, it says a lot more about Barack Obama than his Cabinet appointee.

Internally, some have questioned Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s role in overseeing the efforts, noting that the Nobel laureate with the keen grasp of physics at times seems to lack political skills. On one occasion, Chu prepared a dense PowerPoint presentation to brief Obama on the complexities of last summer’s BP oil spill. After Chu narrated six slides, one senior adviser who attended the meeting recalled that Obama simply stood up and said, “Steve, I’m done.”

Remember when the media described George W. Bush as “intellectually incurious”? I’m pretty sure that Bush could make it through more than six Power Point slides explaining a severe environmental accident. A Cabinet Secretary shouldn’t need “political skills” to get a President to pay attention on issues of importance.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at obamaisms@edmorrissey.com with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

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Pure speculation, Ed. GW had the benefit of not having to sit through Steven Chu’s powerpoint presentation. Who knows…he might have shoved sharp pencils in his ears and gouged his own eyes out to get away from it. Obama just got bored because it wasn’t about him.

Now would be a great time for yet two more professors to write yet another book to be promoted by yet more leftist media outlets, detailing how Republicans are anti-science because they don’t believe the Poli Sci Retard in Chief has the power to write policy, and change the weather.

Pure speculation, Ed. GW had the benefit of not having to sit through Steven Chu’s powerpoint presentation. Who knows…he might have shoved sharp pencils in his ears and gouged his own eyes out to get away from it. Obama just got bored because it wasn’t about him.

SKYFOX on October 19, 2011 at 8:12 AM

If the slideshow were that boring, I think GWB would have just hollered for another pot of coffee.

While obviously a president should be extremely polite but I would have to be there before I blame him for this. I worked for a principal that would make transparencies (slides?) of book pages and then read them to us or another scenario is that Chu’s explanations might have been too in-depth, I’ve never bought in to the Obama is brilliant theory.

Remember when the media described George W. Bush as “intellectually incurious”? I’m pretty sure that Bush could make it through more than six Power Point slides explaining a severe environmental accident.

Ed, I think you may have gotten this one wrong. See, W was in the evil oil business for a while one of several real world businesses in which he had some real world experience. He probably could have explained the situation to Chu, and in fewer slides.

Barack, on the other hand, is a community organizer. Who knows if he even took a college level science course in his life?

Could it be that Obama didn’t need to see any more because he’d just gotten his raison d’etre for further crippling the gas and oil industries in the U.S. by imposing by fiat his ill-conceived and unconstitutional drilling moratorium because of this disaster?

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” according to his fellow Alinsky-ite Rahm.

Where are all the conspiracy theorists who somehow believed the Bush administration was capable of “ordering” and orchestrating the deaths of innocent civilians when they could just as easily posit that Obama’s minions caused the rig explosion in order to accomplish their war on U.S. oil and gas development?

Obama, with his hand raised, “Mr. Chu, can I get a hall pass to use the restroom?” Then Barry goes into a stall to sneak a smoke.

So much for restoring science to it’s rightful place. This is the guy who was going to cool the planet and make the tides recede. The only climate he’s managed to cool is the business climate and to make my retirement account recede into a puddle. Thanks for nothin’, Mr. Wizard.

Down here in Louisiana, we quickly noticed last year that Mr Obama was doing an incredibly inept, incompetent job of responding to the BP Oil Spill.

At first there was no reaction at all from the Federal Gummint, then when even his lapdog media began criticizing him, Mr Obama went too far and used the oil spill as an excuse to strangle the entire O&G industry for the recklessness of one bad apple.

Despite several US Federal Court rulings against him, Mr Obama continues to break the law with his “permitorium” against new drilling permits and permit renewals.

I reckon that meatpuppet Mr Obama feels that he needs to practice more crony capitalism by helping out George Soros’s O&G investments down in Brazil via US Gummint permitoriums & bureaucratic footdragging up here. Mr Obama truly doesnt care that freeing up the permit process would create 100,000 real jobs, high paying ones, literally overnight.